At least 17 civilians have been killed in multiple Taliban attacks in Afghanistan, officials said on Saturday, underscoring increasing insecurity for ordinary people as foreign forces complete their withdrawal next year.
An insurgent attack on a road construction workers’ camp in Karukh district in the western province of Herat left nine workers dead overnight.
“The Taliban attacked their camp along the Herat-Badghis road while they were asleep last,” Abdul Rauf Ahmadi, provincial police spokesman, said
The workers were employed by a government-owned road construction company, he said.
A provincial governor spokesman confirmed the deaths, blaming “enemies of Afghanistan”, a term used to refer to the Taliban.
A roadside bomb also killed five civilians, including women and children, and wounded three others in the southern province of Helmand province on Saturday morning.
“A van hit a roadside bomb in the Marjah district of Helmand killing five civilians and wounding three,” Omar Zwak, the Helmand governor’s spokesman, said.
They were on their way to Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, for shopping, he said.
Also in Helmand, an IED (improvised explosive device) killed three women in Musa Qala district on Friday, a police spokesman said.
IEDs are the Taliban’s weapon of choice in their battle against the US-backed government and foreign forces, but they often kill and wound civilians.
According to recent United Nations report, civilian casualties in the Afghan war rose 23 percent in the first half of this year due to Taliban attacks and increased fighting between insurgents and government forces.
The increase reversed a decline in 2012 and raised questions about how Afghan troops can protect civilians as US-led NATO soldiers withdraw from the 12-year war.
The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said 1,319 civilians died and 2,533 were injured as a result of the war from January 1 to June 30, up 23 percent on the same period in 2012.

Ferry Sinks in Philippines Killing 28, 200 Missing

A ferry sank in the central Philippines on Friday killing at least 28 people after colliding with a cargo vessel owned by a company involved in the world’s worst peacetime maritime disaster nearly 30 years ago.
More than 200 people were still missing after the collision just outside the port of Cebu that left two huge holes in the bow of the cargo ship, Reuters reported.
Small planes and helicopters were scouring the waters for survivors and divers were to search the sunken vessel later in the day after an oil slick had cleared, officials said.
Some 630 people had been rescued, many by fishing boats, and 214 were missing, the coast guard said. Many of the survivors were sick from swallowing oil and seawater.
The 40-year-old ferry was approaching Cebu when it collided with the departing cargo ship, the Sulpicio Express 7, at about 9 pm (1300 GMT). It sank in minutes.
“Search and rescue operations by the navy and coast guard are continuing with the help of some commercial vessels,” acting coast guard chief Rear Admiral Luis Tuason told local radio.
“The number of missing is still huge.”
The Sulpicio Express 7 is owned by unlisted firm Philippine Span Asia Carrier Corp, formerly known as Sulpicio Lines Inc, which owned the MV Dona Paz ferry.
That vessel collided with a tanker in the Sibuyan Sea in December 1987, killing 4,375 on the ferry and 11 of the tanker’s 13-man crew.
Scores, sometimes hundreds, of people die each year in ferry accidents in the Philippines, an archipelago of 7,100 islands with a notoriously poor record for maritime safety.
Overcrowding is common, and many of the vessels are in bad condition.
The owners of the ferry involved in Friday’s accident said it was carrying 723 passengers, 118 crew and 104 20-ft containers. It had an authorized capacity of 1,010 passengers and crew and 160 containers.
The ferry had requested a change in its approach to port minutes before the accident, Tuason said, but it was unclear if the cargo vessel had agreed.

CIA Acknowledges Area 51’s Existence

The CIA has officially acknowledged the secret US test site known as Area 51, in a newly unclassified internal history of the U-2 spy plane program.
The document obtained by a US university describes the 1955 acquisition of the Nevada site for testing of the secret spy plane.
It also explains the site’s lingering association with UFOs and aliens.
The remote patch of desert surrounding Groom Lake was chosen because it was adjacent to a nuclear testing facility.
The U-2 plane, developed to spy on the Soviet Union during the Cold War, is still flown by the US Air Force.
The document, a secret 1992 internal CIA history of the U-2 program, was originally declassified in 1998 with heavy redactions.
Many of the blacked-out details were revealed this month after a public records request by the National Security Archive at the George Washington University in Washington DC.
The site was selected for the U-2 program in 1955 after an aerial survey by CIA and Air Force staff.
According to the history, President Dwight Eisenhower personally signed off on the acquisition. Officials from the CIA, Air Force and Lockheed, the contractor building the U-2, began moving into the facility in July 1955.
While a lengthy account of the development of the U-2 spy plane program, the history also attempts to shed light on the public’s fascination with the Area 51 site and its lingering associations with extra-terrestrials and UFOs.
It notes that testing of the U-2 plane in the 1950s - at altitudes much higher than commercial airplanes then flew - provoked “a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs)”.
The original request for the redacted portions of the history was made in 2005. It was released to the National Security Archive several weeks ago.

Turkmen President Quits as Party Leader

Turkmenistan’s president said on Saturday he was stepping down as leader of the ruling party to promote a multi-party system in the former Soviet state, a government source said.
President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov told a party conference he was resigning as leader of the ruling Democratic Party he has led since 2006, the source said on condition of anonymity, AFP reported.
“The president of a country should not be a member of any party, so as not to create advantages for his party in multi-party conditions,” the source quoted the president as saying at the conference.
Berdymukhamedov, a dentist by profession, took power in 2006 after the death of his father, eccentric dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, who erected a golden rotating statue of himself as part of a bizarre personality cult.
Berdymukhamedov also took over as Democratic Party leader from Niyazov. Formerly the Turkmen branch of the Soviet Communist Party, it was the country’s only party for two decades.
Last year, a new law authorized the creation of a new political party called the Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs of Turkmenistan.
Both parties are set to contest parliamentary elections in December this year.
Berdymukhamedov has embarked on tentative reforms, although his critics say the stabs at change have been little more than window dressing and he has done little to truly dismantle Niyazov’s legacy.
The president also said that as leader of the armed forces, the law bars him from being a member of any party, according to the source.
It was unclear whether the party members would immediately vote for a new leader. State television was due to air a report on the conference later Saturday.

Floods in China Claim 25 Lives

Twenty-five people have been killed by floods which hit northeastern China over the past week, state media said on Saturday, as other parts of the country continued to experience a heatwave.
The biggest floods recorded in decades in China’s northeast region, which borders Russia, began last week, submerging buildings and forcing people from their homes, China’s official Xinhua news agency said.
Floods caused by heavy rain in the provinces of Heilongjiang, Liaoning and Jilin have led to the relocation of 140,000 people, and economic losses of 7.1 billion yuan ($1.2 billion).
Pictures posted online showed brick farmhouses surrounded by water, and a small bridge which had been swept away by swollen river.
Residents of Shenyang, in Liaoning province, were shown wading through waist-deep water to reach their cars, while one man negotiated the waters in a rubber dinghy.
Meanwhile, much of the rest of China has continued to experience a heatwave which saw temperatures in China’s commercial hub Shanghai reach their highest levels in at least 140 years earlier this month.

Floods in Russia
Meanwhile, on the other side of the border, as many as 100,000 Russians may be evacuated from their homes near if the region’s biggest floods for 120 years get worse, Russian media reported on Saturday.
The floods, caused by a month of unusually heavy rain, are not expected to start receding until early September, the head of Russia’s hydrometeorology monitoring service told news agency Ria Novosti.
Television footage showed residents rowing boats past half-submerged houses and military vehicles dumping gravel to counter the floodwater, which has already led to the evacuation of about 170,000 people from the Amur, Khabarovsk and Jewish Autonomous regions.
“The damage is extensive, but the most significant achievement is there have been no casualties ... we cannot relax, there is still a lot of work to be done,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a televised address.

Militants Shot Dead Female Politician in Pakistan

Gunmen shot dead a secular female politician from Pakistan’s troubled northwest after breaking into her home at night, police said on Saturday. Najma Hanif, 35, was a senior member of the Awami National Pary (ANP) which is known for its outspoken views against the Taliban and backed military operations against the insurgents while it ruled the restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
Police said the gunmen, who have not yet been identified, used a silenced pistol in their attack on Friday night, AFP reported.
“One or two attackers entered the house and killed her,” said Mohammad Faisal, a senior police officer in the city of Peshawar where the shooting happened. The motive was not immediately clear but Hanif’s husband and son along with their bodyguard were killed by a Taliban suicide bomber in November 2011. The ANP led the province and was a member of the ruling coalition in the centre from 2008 until elections earlier this year.
The party has been relentlessly targeted by the Taliban, losing hundreds of activists, with attacks against them stepped up during the run-up to the polls in May. Cricketer-turned politician Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) has now formed a coalition government in the province but ANP leaders remain in the militants’ sights.

Remembering Marikana Bloodbath

Comrades and families of 34 miners shot dead by South African police marked the first anniversary of the bloodbath at Marikana Friday in a rally boycotted by the ruling ANC.